"If you allow yourself to give way to such absurd vagaries as these, how do you expect me to fulfil the final part of our compact?"
"Quite right, Mr. Hanbury. I will moderate my raptures, sir. This is not, as you might say, either the time or place for heroics. The idiot boy is a more engaging part than the iconoclast maniac. The truth is, I have eaten nothing to-day yet, and I am a bit lightheaded. You don't use eau-de-cologne? Few men do. I do. It is very refreshing. Now let us go on. I am quite calm."
They had stopped a minute, and Leigh spilled some perfumed spirit from his small silver flask, and inhaled the spirit noisily.
"Hah! I feel all right again. Speaking of the idiot boy makes me think of asking you if, when you were at school, you had the taste for speaking?"
"Mr. Leigh," said Hanbury severely, "you allow yourself great freedom with liberties."
"Ha-ha-ha! Capital. You are right. I should not have said that. You will try to forgive me. I shall remember your words, though. They would go well in a play. But we must dismiss folly. The weather is too hot for repartee. At least, I find it too hot. Talking of heat reminds me of a furnace, and that brings me back to something I said to you about my having made a discovery or invention in chemistry, which will completely outshine mystery gold. The Italians have a saying that as a man grows old he gives up love, and devotes himself to wine. Love has never been much in my way, and now that I have passed the bridge, the pons asinorum over which all men who are such asses as to live long enough go when they turn thirty-five, I have no intention of taking to wine, for it does not agree with me. But I am seriously thinking of taking to gold. Gold, sir, is a thing that becomes all times of life, and glorifies age. There is a vast fortune in my discovery. Hah!"
"And what may be the nature of your discovery?"
"Do you know anything of chemistry?"
"Nothing."
"Or of metallurgy even?"